


Mentor Program

by Cockzilla



Series: Mentorship [1]
Category: Wreck-It Ralph (2012)
Genre: Gen, M/M, On Hiatus
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-10
Updated: 2016-07-10
Packaged: 2018-07-22 16:49:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7446559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cockzilla/pseuds/Cockzilla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Turbo always wanted to be the boss, but when casual programmers bring him back into Sugar Rush, he finds out being a boss in the video game world isn't always the best thing to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Does anything happen to the dog??

**Author's Note:**

> Written real soon after the movie came out, but I lost the feel for the characters/their voices before I finished. Eventually I plan to return to this, but for now it's on indefinite hiatus. I also wrote this and originally post it on tumblr, sans beta reader, so watch out for a ton of typos! I'm a very sloppy writer.  
> There's shipping intended in this fic later on, but the gen part of the fic is more important and I never got to the shipping before I had to set this down, so I haven't tagged for it.

The dominoes started falling into place when the dog fell sick. The medicine prescribed had odd effects, and the healers said it was like using their abilities on a void, and when the recently beloved Felix took his hammer to the poor hound it did nothing, sounding off the success sound in mono.  
They’d all had their suspicions about his game. Some of the Nintendo tourists, wanderers that stopped in when their cartridge was left in the arcade’s tourney consoles, mentioned that the dog normally had much darker fur than the one at Litwak’s game central station. But he was friendly, and always enjoyed a good petting, and he’d laugh at all of your jokes (even when he was just laughing at how badly you delivered it). So they ignored it when the games instructions would occasionally pop up with misspellings or improper grammar, and didn’t mention to the laughing dog that the title on the left side of his machine read DUGK HUNT. After the incident with Turbo and the suggestion that Venellopy might be a glitch, they didn’t want to see what might happen to a real glitch, one that affected game play in a negative way.  
Litwak himself had always had suspicions about the machine himself. The mistakes on the casing were there when he bought it, waved away as an error when painting back over some obscene graffiti. But it had had problems before. And now it would glitch whenever the dog went to hold up the mark, the visuals slowing and stuttering. The arcade owner went ahead and grabbed an out-of-order print out as a young college student and his friends rushed over to his counter. 

“Mr. Litwak! I don’t believe it. I never thought-”

“What, that a game might break down? It happens. A lot of these games are older than you are.”

Mr. Litwak rose from his stool, shoulders heavy, and grabbed the tape for the sign. The college student, face flushed eagerly, waved his hands until Litwak paused.

“No! no, no. I never thought I’d see an original Nentendo bootleg! I mean, I had come in a few times before and noticed a few things off about the text but-”

“Whoah, slow down there kid.”

“-the way it’s glitching now-”

The casino manager in the gambling game behind Litwak’s counter held the roulette wheel demo’s spin, close enough to overhear the damning word.

“-that’s one of the Nentendo tells! God, this is amazing!”

“Look, I didn’t know it was a bootleg when I got it, so thanks for letting me know.”

“Of course you didn’t know it was a bootleg! They were one of the most convincing bootleg makers ever. Since all of their games were just as good as the originals, they go for big bucks on the market. You get a one of a kind bootleg and a game you can still play, all in one!”

Litwak considered the young man before him. Scruffy blonde hair and goatee, black glasses with the paint chipping off their metal frames, and a stature more befitting a preteen han a grown man. He’d seen him in here for years. The kid had loved the games, then began paying attention to them, and recently Litwak had even overheard him talking with his friends about mechanics and code and other things that went far beyond the arcade owner’s basic knowledge of ‘working’ and ‘not-working’.

“... So, are you saying it can be fixed?”

“I’m saying you gotta fix it! That thing is a classic, there probably aren’t fifteen left in the world still working. Let me at least take a pict-”

Litwak held up a hand to break through the young man’s overt enthusiasm. It was like a cloud over his perception of the youngster’s authenticity. Litwak adjusted his glasses, squinting at the young man before him, like the kid’s credibility was a mote of dust on the face before him and if he looked hard enough he could see it as clear as day.

“Are you saying YOU could fix it? Pete, I swear by him as a technician, warned me never to get bootleg games. He says they can’t be fixed, at least not by him, and there’s no such thing as a warranty.”

“Honestly? I’d love to fix it. Not just the problem, but the whole game. I’ve been studying game design in college and I’ve been itching to get my hands on a PCB board for ages and..”

He trailed off, breaking his focus on the machine he’d left behind and bringing it back towards the arcade’s owner. He was chuckling, but it was bitter, and he was leaning back on his counter like it was his last moment seeing the old game. The young man looked back at the casing, and while it was scuffed, sun bleached, and the gun grip was worn down to white plastic, he could swear he saw it like Litwak saw it, as new as the day he bought it.

“Well, it’s not like there’s anything else I could do with the old thing but throw it out at this point. I have to get some chow in me, but I can come back after nine to let you in, …?”

Litwak’s pause took a moment to register with the college student, helped along by the hand he held out.

“Ah! My name’s Mitch Rabbin. I promise I’ll get the old box working again.”

He shook Mr. Litwak’s hand furiously, shaking the older man’s glasses down to the tip of his nose.

+++++++++++

The noise in game central station was overwhelming to Ralph’s ears. He could feel his shoulders tense up as the murmurings and conversations around him made it hard to hear himself think He flinched away when a spiky turtle shell brushed his arm, fist clenched and ready to strike out at the next thing that invaded his personal space. Luckily, he was brought back from his haze of temper by the bobble headed child clinging to his neck.

“Hey snot head, calm down. I signed up for a ride, not a brawl.”

He looked up at her, saw the worry in her smile, and patted her on the head gently.

“Ah.. yeah. It’s just hard to be calm when nobody else is...”

“Well, since you have to calm down, like, every other minute, you should be the best at it by now.”

“Maybe your spastic self could learn a thing or two from me then.”

Venellopy chuckled weakly at the jab, then, after looking around at the nervous crowd gathered in the game central station, buried her face in the thicket of Ralph’s uncombed hair. The auburn cloud obscured any defeated looks or murmurs about the friendly dog being unplugged.   
Ralph rubbed one finger nervously over her shoe as it pressed into his collarbone. He saw Venellopy’s crisis as a potential glitch so strongly in the situation unfolding, and her almost-game over was only four months passed. Even he was fighting off memories of her almost-death from the tension of the situation, and he had lived through, thought he was over the trauma of one day of brutal unplugging.

A laser shot cracking the ceiling broke Ralph’s internal struggle to pieces, along with his clumsily constructed calm.  
Calhoun and her troops from Hero’s Duty had ventured into the glitching game, hoping to bring back the sick dog, in case this Mitch fellow was as untrustworthy as he sounded and the bootleg game had to be unplugged. Ralph stood on his toes, an unnecessary measure when he was heads taller than most of the sprites around him, and tried to see in between the tightly packed formation of soldiers for the dog, but couldn’t get a good look. Calhoun fired her gun again to focus the quieted attention on her.

“Quiet, Bugfood! I know you worry warts are going to go into sap-shock over it, but we couldn’t get him out.”

A collective gasp and out break of muttering fired up in the crowd. Before it could devolve into unorganized question, Calhoun let another volley fly into the abused ceiling. The surge protector had to be held back by Felix, intent on taking the gun from the mad woman.

“I told the lot of you pixel-clowns to be quiet! It wasn’t some disaster zone in there, and Chuckles the pooch is still aware enough to laugh, but he’s too sick to move.”

Ralph could feel tiny fingers tighten around the roots of his hair.

“I’ve gota stress this, folks! Get back to your games until the maintenance is over. Litwak will be here and he didn’t power down the machines, so everyone’s still got to be playable, fully loaded and ready to go! Make sure to keep up your idle animations. The old fogey got a little too suspicious last time we had our polygons in a twist, so his eyes are gona be master sword sharp tonight.”

Many hero sprites rushed the squad leader, unable to accept that another character was unrescuable, and demanded (through clear gestures, since most of them were mute) they be let into Duck Hunt to try the rescue themselves.  
Ralph looked to Vanellopy on his shoulders, just as she peeked through his hair down at him. He frowned stumbling over his words before she cut him off.

“This isn’t like my game, big guy. There’s a chance chuckle’s game might actually get fixed, for good! And...”

Ralph picked her off her perch on his neck, bringing her around to sit on his arm. Most of the other characters around them were returning to their own games, but slowly and with eyes trained on the imperiled game’s plug. He kept quiet, watching her until her hesitation passed.

“And really, if your dummy actions in my game are a pattern with you, I don’t want to see you getting involved with any more life threatening situations for the sake of some glitch.”

“Veneloppy! You are not just some glitch! You’re the best glitch I know, even if you are as smart as a box of rock candies.”

Venellopy, now dangling from Ralph’s hold on her hoodie, laughed and rolled her fists at his fighting words. Ralph smiled and set her down.

“But, I get what you mean. No risks, not when they’re not necessary.”

Venellopy punched his knee before he pushed her towards her game’s plug.

“Or when then those risks are fun, then it’s awesome, like taking a turn too fast or squeezing passed two racers trying to pinch you.”

“Yeah, well, getting caught outside my game again isn’t fun or necessary, so I have to head back. And you should too!”

Ralph stopped near the platform for his game, leaning up again the large doorway. He worried the free button on his overalls and watched the young racer maneuver through the taller characters’ legs back towards her game. They had been hanging out nightly since Ralph had saved both of their games. Most of the time, the little president would leave her citizens to their own devices and come over to Ralph’s new shack. She said she’d forgiven the other racers, since their very memories had been manipulated against her, but that still didn’t make up for all the time they’d spent separately. Often Gloyd or Taffeta, or some other racer, would try to pal around with her, mentioning some prank at a party or gaffe in a race by one of the more accident prone racers. But she hadn’t been there for that instance, not any of their entertaining stories, and they just served to remind her of her bad relations with them before her reinstatement. Ralph understood, since he didn’t hang out with the nicelanders much after work, even after their reconciliation. It was just so natural for him to break things, and even if the nicelanders were understanding of it now, there was no reason to test their patience when he could be spending time with Venellopy instead. Beyond that, they both agreed it felt a little more natural to have a night sky when the real world was also dark, instead of the perpetual daylight in the candy-themed world. But when pie got boring or the duck population seemed like an infestation, Ralph would head over to the castle to taste some of the confections nicelanders didn’t know how to make (which was anything other than pie).The castle was a much better place to host their hang-outs, cavernous with many small rooms for hide and seek, and long hallways for games of ‘toss the president’ (a game that gave the donut cops a purpose in the now peaceful kingdom).  
But the throne room always creeped him out, reminded him of who he first met there, and whenever they passed the door to the dungeon, a terrifying voice at the back of his head always gave the cheerful correction of ‘fungeon’. It messed with his head. Every time he’d knock Felix off the building, even during the game overs, Felix would still pop back up at the end of the day, good as new. It was the same for any of the other villains in the arcade. The characters they killed never stayed dead at the end of the day. Beyond Turbo himself, , no one else had ever killed another character permanently.   
He hadn’t been back to bad anon since, worried that the distinction might make him feel separated from the characters that were there to help him. The more he thought about it, the more determined he became that once the crisis with the poor laughing dog was over, he’d go and visit. Things were going good in his life, apart from the M word hanging over his head, and he felt like sharing that with the villains who had helped him. Ralph gnawed at his lip as he waited, wondering if his conviction would last until the meeting at the end of the week.  
Finally, Felix returned, thoroughly smooched. Ralph had learned by now that showering affection on the handyman was Calhoun’s favorite method of de-stressing after a particularly unpleasant mission. After the mack-fest that Ralph had carefully ignored, he was extremely worried, both for the dog’s condition, and for Felix’s ability to ever uncross his eyes. He gave his co-worker a gentle nudge towards the tram, nearly toppling the smaller man.

“Better cool down on the train, Fix-It. You have to be playable tonight.”

Felix laughed a little too giddily and suddenly Ralph was worrying less for the other games and more for his own.

 

+++++++

Litwak placed the controller back in its holster, letting the smile he’d been fighting the whole game finally creep onto his face. Mitch and his friend Brian, a pasty teenager whose ponytail looked more well kept than his face, sat on short stools, wires of every color pooled out around their feet. The glare from Mitch’s laptop, hardwired into the system with an adaptor he’d brought himself, obscured their eyes behind their glasses, but Litwak could see even with that how anxious they were to have his input. Litwak faced them and leaned back against the consol, sighing gravely.

“Well boys, you did it. I don’t think it’s ever played this good. It even seems better than I remember the real version being. But, seems like it still has a few spelling errors? You couldn’t take those out?”

Mitch snapped the laptop shut, startling even Brian, who jolted back almost off his stool.

“I had to leave some indication this was originally a magnificent knockoff. I DID change any text errors that made the instructions confusing. But otherwise the errors stay. If you want them gone you’ll have to call someone else in because I would never deface such a classic of...”

Litwak was hiding the laughter behind his hand, which, when facing the student, didn’t hide much at all. He tried and failed to swallow his grin.

“Sorry kid, just had to ask, since I felt like you’d react that way.”

Brian started to laugh, too, while Mitch just rolled his eyes at the ribbing and started unhooking the cords from the adapter.

“Okay, I get it. I’m predictable. But, fixing that? Relatively easy, and I don’t have anywhere else to be tomorrow morning. Did you have any other games that are giving you problems? I’m honestly learning a lot about how these machines are set up, and would love to work on another one.”

Now it was Brian’s turn to look skyward at his friend’s simpering. He avoided making another joke at Mitch’s expense by focussing on tucking all the wires back into their proper alignment. Mitch helped him get the sideboard back into place while he waited on the arcade’s owner to answer.

Litwak took stock of his machines, trying to think back about any glitches that had made him browse the internet for a replacement machine, fretting for the rest of the day over the price of classics and the risk of new titles. None of the ones remaining in his arcade had given him such ulcer-inducing stress, but he remembered a suspicious problem he’d had with one. A major character just up and disappearing after years of steady play? It didn’t set right with him a few weeks ago and it still didn’t. Litwak looked from the problem machine to the two young programmers, who had put the machine back together flawlessly, or as close as he could hope (he’d tighten the screws later).

“You know what Mitch? I think I do have a game for you to take a look at.”


	2. Cheeto Finger Redemption

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> King Candybug wakes up in a not so strange place, and gets to race again! But it's not exactly like it was before, is it?

Litwak had opened up the cooler and the snack locker for Brian. Brian was much more familiar with the hardware aspect of the games, so once they’d got Mitch hooked up to the Sugar Rush machine, there wasn’t much else for him to do. He had helped Litwak shut down the screens for the night, but that had taken all of ten minutes, and if the intense interest painted think on Mitch’s face was any indication, they probably could have gone for a second dinner. Brian looked down towards his doritos dejectedly at that thought, then grumbled at Mitch.

“So, is it a bootleg? What’s its problem.”

Mitch laughed, finally brought back out of his reading enough to be surprised.

“No! It’s a legitimate copy. But, it’s almost like it had a virus? I didn’t even know arcade consoles could get viruses.”

It was like saying it outloud had really brought home the novelty of the idea to him. He chuckled, a wide grin taking over his face, and returned to reading sections of code and loading up a low res depiction of what they corresponded to.  
Litwak sighed,

“Of course, game gets a virus when it ought to be impossible. Must be my luck with racing games.”

Brian crumpled up his empty bag, licking the extra seasoning dust off his fingers.

“What do you mean by that, sir?”

“Well, a few years back, two of my most popular racing games went bad in a really messy way. Bought them both second hand, so no warranty. Sent them off to a wholesaler for parts.”

Mitch looked up now, the story catching his attention enough to pry him away from the candy themed levels.

“Was one of those games TurboTime?”

“Yeah, kid. It was. Didn’t know you were around here playing back then.”

“It was my first game, when I was barely tall enough to reach the controls. I always wondered why it disappeared out of the blue. But I looked into it later and it’s not surprising that it broke down.”

“What do you mean?”  
“It was a mess right from the development stage. It was originally going to be a first person racer, but that ended up too hard to render in 8 bits, so they pooled the assets they’d made and made it a 2D side scrolling racer. Much simpler to make art and animations for. Oh, and did you ever find that smug main character annoying?”

Mitch turned back to his code, unable to hide his own smug grin at being able to educate others about his favorite topic. Litwak saw it, but decided to humor him.

“Yeah. I haven’t heard the words ‘turbo tastic’ in years, and i think I could go to the grave happy if I didn’t have to hear them again.”

“Yeah! Total little craphead. Well, until they scrapped the first person view, he was supposed to be the villain you raced against, and the two other guys were his cronies. They just used all of the lines they’d recorded and his design, and made him the protagonist instead of the player.”

“Are you sure that’s not just a rumor? Seems like something I would have heard about.”

“I heard about it in a recent interview with a veteran Tobikomi worker.... Speaking of changed characters, who’s this guy?”

Mitch waved Litwak and Brian over, a blurry King Candy model loaded up along side his code. Litwak pointed at him enthusiastically.

“That’s the guy! The king of the game or something. He wasn’t my favorite racer, but he had no gimmicks so I think his overall stats were better. He’s who I always recommended for starting players.”

“Looks like his code was mangled by that virus. I don’t know where to start with the mess it is now. Can’t even tell where the code for his car and racing stats might be. If he’s un-runnable as a racer, then that’s why he’s not showing up on the roster any more.”

“So you can’t fix him? The roster’s well rounded now, so that’s not a big deal. But if he’s still sick or ‘viral’, should you even leave him in the game?”

Litwak stood, brushed his knees off, and headed back to his sad meal of chips and orange soda. Mitch nodded, mumbling for Litwak to let him see about it.

Mitch scanned through the information, looking for some way to make the broken character function in the game. He came across useless acceleration and speed stats, an odd mix of different voice files with drastically different naming conventions, and finally... different character models? He knew that some of the working characters had alternate outfits, some more courtly than their normal attire. He had the model load up, wondering at all the inconsistencies in the King Candy character. Not all of it could have been caused by the viral replacements. Too much of it was benign, useless to both the game’s mechanics and to the viral purposes of destroying and propagating. With all the differences about him, he seemed like a bonus character, one that had never really been implemented into the game. He tabbed back over to the character model, eyes going wide behind his thick lenses. 

Okay, whatever the character had originally been meant for, the corrupted model meant he was now primo boss material. Mitch didn't think he could think up a more menacing, uncanny, candy themed monster if he tried. Instantly his mind was racing, no longer planning on implementing the king as an NPC, but rather as a final boss. But, how did one make a boss level... in a racing game? First things first: Mitch gave him a cart’s damage meter and set it as his life meter, then exploited the viral attraction to light, then ascribed points gained to damage dealt, then deleted sections of an unused track, then...

Brian coughed, standing behind his laptop, wearing a worried expression for his friend. His friend who was currently laughing under his breath, typing like a maniac, and letting his gaze go around the screen like it was a multiball round. Mitch looked up from his work and got embarrassed, suddenly aware of what he must have looked like. 

“So, Mitch, what did you find that has you so hyped up?”

“Just come look! All the assets were already here. I’m implementing it as a tie breaker.”

Brian carefully balanced his second soda as he pushed wires out of the way for a place to sit. He looked over the work Mitch had done so far, and started to grin along with him. But, he always played devil’s advocate to Mitch’s designs, so he couldn’t stop now.

“If you’re using the viral design as the base, isn’t it going to still act like a virus? Especially if you’re going to make it respawn.”

“Hmmm... You’re right. I guess I’m trying to make this game better, not tear it apart. How about... okay there’s its ability to replicate - turn that option off. Oh, and looks like the default action is to destroy or assimilate. Better turn that off. Would make for a really frustrating boss level, instant KOs on the first encounter?”

Brian snorted, slapping the side of Mitch’s head,

“Yeah, what are you trying to do here, make an Atlas game?”

They devolved into ugly laughter, much to the shame of Litwak. He couldn’t hear their every word, but he’d heard that last crack, and he had the horrible feeling that they thought themselves ‘cool’. It was a terrible thing to witness.

++++++  
Coconut shavings dug into the back of his head, and oddly, into select spots all down his back. He could tell through his eyelids it was sunny, but it was always sunny. Something in him wasn’t ready to open his eyes yet. The smell around him, it was something like flat soda, ginger, and cough drops. He cracked one eye open, adjusting to the light while observing the silhouettes above him. Stringy cotton candy hanging from live black licorice tree branches. To his left a scrubby cough-drop conifer. He let both eyes slide open slowly, seeing more of the same. He waited for his eyes to focus, for his depth perception to tame the oddly out-of-proportion foliage back into proper perspective. As he waited, his back felt... stiff? He went to twist, to make himself more comfortable and the crack his spine into place.  
Then he felt the coconut grass, infinitely fine beneath him, slide against what was his skin and yet not, down a back that extended well past where his legs should be and surely didn’t have a spine to set right.  
He looked over at his insectoid claw, the back at the sky as he curled it into a fist. He gnashed his teeth, brought his back up in an arch, he legs flailing in the air, and let his frustration bubble over and out as a growl, then a screech, then finally a deafening whir that was both mechanical and insectoid in nature. He closed his eyes and repeated the scream in short bursts as he clutched at the ground and slapped his abdomen and tails against the earth over and over. Eventually, a need for breath put his tantrum to rest, and he panted out of habit while fans in his spericals (the term rose from memories he’d never had before) kicked into gear and got oxygen back into his system. He glared at nothing, was glad no one could see him in his moment of loss.  
Because that’s what it was. He remembered loving his new, powerful body. Larger than any other character he knew, all sharp points and armor, and best of all, capable of flight. No, his body was perfect, if a little alien still. He’d only been conscious in it for a few hours. It was waking up in it that kindled his rage faster than gasoline. He’d had nightmares about losing, in fact that’s what most of his nightmares were about: losing a race, losing control over the candy kingdom, losing control of himself. Without his new body, what was to say the catastrophe of its upgrading was anything but just another of his horrible dreams? But he woke up like this, and that meant he was a loser. Winners didn’t wake up altered, laid out on their backs, in the middle of nowhere, with no home to return to.  
He awkwardly pulled himself upright with his arms, his hind-legs unable to get purchase when turned upside down. He shook the yellowed coconut grass off himself as well as he could. It was the chunk of fudgy earth stuck right at the crux of his thorax and abdomen that again overwhelmed him with the un-kingly indignity of his situation. Snarling, he slammed a shoulder into the nearest licorice oak, uprooting it halfway. He slid under the tilted trunk and rubbed against it until the chunk was dislodged. When he was clean again, he sighed and pushed the tree the rest of the way down with a hind leg. he thought dejectedly of sour bill, and how he would have handled the offending mud with more dignity than a(n un-)common animal. Step ladders and brooms would have been needed, but even that would have been high manners compared to the mess he’d made in the swamp around him.  
He remembered hearing about this place. A ginger ale geyser, fizzing out to flat soda swamp land. The candy forests near the castle had much better planning, in terms of what quality of candy grew in them. Out here, in the wilds of extra unused data were the butterscotch thorn bushes, sour snakes, and wedding mint toadstools. It was a thoroughly unappetizing place, and one where it was unlikely he’d run into any recently awakened candy citizen. He put it together in an instant, that even though he’d not seen her cross the finish line, he’d been the last thing standing between that glitch and her rightful place as ruler of the game.  
Thoughts of what power and privilege he’d lost to the glitch brought him finally to how he’d lost. Pieces of his last moments only rose to the surface as they were relevant to his thoughts, but now he concentrated on them, chewing his lip. At least until he was painfully reminded that his teeth were now sharp, and not really suited for lip gnawing of such intensity. He sat down with a thump, legs splayed from sitting cobra style with all of his abdomen (he’d have to figure out a more kingly way of sitting down), and nursed at the blood he’d drawn. He remembered the light, resisting it, almost mentally fracturing from the force of it on his will. But, that light had been a flaming tower of chemical reaction...  
So, did that mean he’d died? It wasn’t an immediately terrifying concept. He’d faced his game over screen a few times back in his early days, after dumbass players had guided him into a turn too fast or failed to avoid the very obvious stone in the middle of the road. But, if he died, how was he here? He looked at the gouges he’d made in the ground and the overturned tree and thought, no, he’d seen the code and letting a character who had yet to respawn, a “ghost”, affect anything real was too big of a programming error for him to have missed in his manipulative forays. So, he was alive. If he weren’t so sore about no longer being the best racer around, or even being capable of racing, he’d have been a lot happier about that. He felt a small bubble of startled joy at the thought he could have been dead, but he quelled it with that one word, ‘loser’. That’s not what he was programmed to be.  
If he’d died, then why had he respawned? And no where near where he’d been incinerated alive. He remembered that part too, when he thought about it. With a thought, his wings powered up, and he hovered above the tree line, above the sight line of an obscuring layer cake cliff formation, and saw the great distance he was from the devastated volcano and even further from his old castle. It was an easy distance to cover for someone who could fly. But that ruled out being carried here and healed by the sugar citizens.  
Slowly, he hovered back to the ground, his face more bewildered than mad. He had really respawned? That was supposed to be impossible. He had heard, far off, the sound of motors echoing off the tracks, so he assumed the arcade was still open. He tapped his chin with a talon, revenge and curiosity stalled by that fact, for now. Then, with a flourish of hands and a chuckle a little too light-hearted for his stature, he thought up a rather pleasant way of passing the time.

++++++

It surprised him. The time had been spent in a pleasant manner. He’d expected to get frustrated or remember something angering halfway through, some reason for him to have torn the whole thing down. Instead he was the smiling constructor of - well it would normally be called a cave or a dome. But at the king’s size, it was a cheerful forest hut, complete with boughs of cough-drop tree on top as roofing (and to cover up the ugly mix of stale licorice and fudge that were his primary construction materials).  
He took some time admiring it. He always felt good at interior and exterior design. He hadn’t been sure what turbotastic color to change the textures at the castle, red or white? So he took the average of the both, which was an incredibly clever moment on his part that no one could appreciate. He hoped at least Sour Bill had appreciated it. He also looked at it, wondering how he’d stuck with it enough that it wasn’t just collapsing in on itself. Must have some new insectoid nesting instinct in his new form.  
After a long round of self congratulations, he started to shear the stale layer-cake of the nearby cliffs into a tea table for his patio (the relatively dry ground surrounding the lump). He stopped when he realized, who would he have over? One one level, it was a question about what size he should make the table, his size or the average guest’s. On another, it was a revelation of the absurdity of his current distraction - there wasn’t anyone he knew that wasn’t in the ‘dirty betrayers and cheaters’ column of his mind, so anyone near his lair should be eaten on principle. The thought of devouring other programs brought him to the problematic thought of where he would get a tea set at his size and made from parts in the wilder-  
Suddenly even his frivolous thoughts faded into a bright light. He fought to think, to be aware of himself, and finally he surfaced. He was first aware of the glowing orb mere inches from his gnashing teeth. Second came the realization that he was flying, and at a sharp clip, which was the least unpleasant thing about the situation. When he unconsciously reached up and used his elbow to rebound off rock-hard layer cake, he focused beyond the painful, scoured surface of his forearm and on the fact that the cake cliffs from before were actually a whole canyon system that he was flying through.  
He scraped against another wall and recanted his description of ‘flying’ to ‘crashing’.  
He tried to hold himself back, digging his claws into the walls around him. But as the small ball of light left him behind, so did the strength in his limbs. They slipped down by his sides. He tried covering his eyes, and again his arms fell limp after he caught a peek between his chitinous fingers. Even his attempts to focus wider than the glowing orb, to try to see both the overwhelming light and the corners he was about to scrape past, failed and made him almost lose consciousness again.  
The light switched directions on a dime, but under its influence, the chimera followed tightly. He flew after it, suddenly above the canyons walls and into the bright sunlight. The inexplicable glow was less bright against the daytime sky, and he could look around him. The sudden rush of freedom, if not total, was exuberating. He looked around, manic grin replacing the stupor on his face, picking out where he ought to fly to next. The grin faltered. Those were racer’s carts. Two of them. Heading right for him.  
The glowing ball flashed bright, now back in the shadows of the narrow canyon, and his eyes were rooted. But it didn’t stop him from feeling a bumper catch and pull at his candy string neck or the wheels that broke the glowing field of his wings and skidded over their physical bases. It hurt like hell, and it caused him to stutter in the air, almost falling stories down to the bottom of the canyon. He didn’t try to fight the light’s power over him now, instead focusing on what had just happened, why it happened. He didn’t remember any active tracks all the way out here. And thank goodness they’d only grazed him, since he had no idea-  
Oh fudge. He’d breached the canyon walls again, much higher and clearer than the last time. He only had time to see the two racers out of the corner of his eye before they crashed, screaming, into his side. He felt some of his carapace crack, bend inward and create tiny tears in the membranes between the fractured sclerites. The first hit went over him, pushed him down and spun him almost upside down His wings flickered in and out of physical space as they clipped against the ridge below him, spraying up large, hard crumbs as they failed to shear through it. The second hit was against his abdomen, and he could feel it in his organs as the cart, with its inertia, smashed his tail out of its way at an unnatural angle. His wings no longer supporting him, he flew forward with his old momentum, and rolled back upright when he hit the edge of the cliff again on his way down. The light was now many cart lengths ahead of him in the canyon, and he gave a bitter grin at finally escaping its hold, even if it meant falling to his death. But as if sensing the king had fallen behind, the ball of light slowed, and flared bright as a halogen lamp. The King Cybug felt his wings flare out in a painful burst, and he raced towards it like he wasn’t even hurting.  
He tried to fight it’s blistering hold over his every move, but his last bit of concentration, in addition to his wounds, tired his mind. His mind blurred to the white-yellow glow that filled his vision. He intersected with the racer’s course three, four? more times. It was hard to remember after the second time a bumper had caught him across his head. At least the diffused light above the canyon walls brought him little islands of sanity, where he started flicking his wings flat against his body whenever he was aware enough to do so. Still, molten chocolate mufflers and sharp sugary cart edges found and nicked his softer spots. By the end of his flight he was unable to stop the screams of pain and frustration, and was leaving a trail of hemolymph and battery acid in the cake dust.  
Just when the pain was beginning to bring him out of his stupor, the walls of the canyon opened up into a wide basin, the river of cold milk that had carved the deep channels falling down as a white waterfall into a wide pool at the bottom. After the pool, the walls of massive cake ended, framing a field of tall sugar-straws and beyond it the swampy forest he’d awoken in. All the awareness was like the shock of mint, cold and harshly clear on his tired brain. It was jarring, and he cautiously looked around for what had been preventing it for what had felt like eons. He saw the orb, now much dimmer, and watched it dissolve into simple, unadorned code.  
His eyes grew wide and he bared his new fangs on new instinct. Had someone messed with the code, brought him back from the dead, and, based on an exploit in his new form, programmed the lit path? To punish, to hurt him? He found his abdomen quivering and rattling in anger, color and heat rising in his face. He muttered the epitaph of ‘meddlesome glitch’ under his breath and started to tear through the air towards the castle. But less metaphorical tearing was going on than real tearing of his wounds that had begun to clot. His hiss of rage returned to one of pain, and he looked between the castle and his swamp in a huff. The feel of his own blood-equivalent oozing down the back of his arm decided it for him, and he flew slowly and steadily back towards his homemade shelter.  
He landed gingerly outside, mincing steps around the abandoned ‘patio’ as he discovered one of his leg joints had been badly shorn. Finally he found a good distribution of his weight and limped inside. Head ducked to avoid touching his sore cranium against the sloping walls, he paced counter clockwise and lowered his body into a curled up circle against one wall. He passed out quickly after, but not before rationalizing his retreat. If they really understood the enormity of the insult they’d paid him, then a little while making them sweat, waiting for his retaliation, couldn’t hurt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check the fic series for a NSFW interlude set after this chapter but before the next one.


	3. Getting real at the round table

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ralph helps Vanellope deal with a startling ghost popping up in her game.

The tiny alarm clock beside Ralph’s bed rang, tiny hammer bringing out a big noise. Ralph reached over to click it off, but his sleepy reflexes meant his hand landed on it without grace. Ralph being who he was, this meant the clock was immediately crushed into a scramble of gears and metal. Ralph flinched, then smiled. The clock was one he’d been given by a nicelander, and like other possessions that regularly got smashed in his daily rampages, it would eventually respawn. It must have been frustrating when your TV wasn’t back in working order in time to watch your stories, and asking Felix would have been asking too much by the nicelanders’ timid standards, but the nicelanders had eventually adjusted to the hardships. They’d even used it as a bonding experience, hanging out with whatever neighbors had the least barraged room that evening.

Ralph had another reason to smile. Today was Sunday. He hadn’t even needed the alarm clock, since the arcade didn’t open until noon. But for the past week Venelope had been dealing with some political situation in her game, and had been too tired out at the end of the day to hang out. So they’d agreed to meet sunday morning, before any racing or wrecking or presiding would happen.Then, afterward the brief stint that the arcade was to open for, he’d finally go to another Bad-anon meeting. He was less excited about the meeting, but he’d sworn to himself to go. 

Ralph put on his clothes for the day, tried to run a comb through his hair and gave up once his hair at least wasn’t mashed down in the back. He brushed his teeth with a wet brush. After years of no dental routine, toothpaste was still a thing he was wary about. He flattened the comforter back over his bed in one smooth motion. He cracked an egg in a skillet that looked like it had been used for combat at one point or another. He watched it fry while trying, and failing, to whistle. He sat down with his fried egg, getting comfortable on the stool that was literally just a stack of bricks. Felix had objected to the ‘chair’ in a house that was otherwise well constructed (thanks to his input), but Ralph had countered him without words. He had reached for the stack of bricks in the corner, quickly arranging them into a second, taller ‘chair’ at the other side of the table. He then picked up Vanellope, who had been watching their argument and giggling like mad, daintily by her arms and set her down on top of the brick stack, where she sat at just the right height to reach the table.

Smiling at the memory, he rinsed off his plate in the sink, and went to leave his small cabin. he lingered in the doorway, going over his plans for the day and wondering if there was anything he was forgetting. He remembered on his way down from the highly-reduced brick pile that he ought to let the tower’s residents know where he was going so they wouldn’t be worried. Even if it was hours until the arcade opened up, it was less orthodox to leave your game before opening. Ralph peeked into He flagged down Roy, who was down on the first floor checking his mail, sunglasses pushed up into his hairline and out of the way.

“Ah! Hey, Roy, I was about to head-”

His smile fell of his face and he sighed. Roy had stammered, jumped up into his sunglasses, and scuttled off to the elevator. Ralph watched him frantically press the button for a moment or two, before interrupting.

“That’s really rude, you know. I just wanted to let you and the other residents know I’d be in Sugar Rush this morning, but I’d be back in time for opening.”

Caught and embarrassed, Roy slumped and turned back to Ralph, but didn’t meet his gaze.

“Honestly, I just panicked. I thought, when you came in here, it was because I’d overslept or something and the game had already started. I’m bad with that on the weekends.”

Ralph watched him shuffle awkwardly into the now open elevator car, giving him a look that made it clear that he knew how much of that was bull. But, he rolled his eyes and gave Roy a weak grin. He ducked out of the low entranceway, heading towards the tram. He knew that saying you were going to change something about yourself, such as how you treated your fellow characters or your propensity to hold a grudge, meant an uphill battle against years of playing a part, and even programming sometimes. He certainly wasn’t helping the residents get used to him as a neighbor in addition to a hence by spending all his off-hours outside the game, but he didn’t mind making friends with them slowly now that he had a new best friend. Smile now securely on his face, he leaned his arms over the back of his seat on the tram and tried to whistle the Sugar Rush theme as he rode.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

He waved to the oreo guards flanking the main doors of the candy castle when he was finally within speaking distance. The path to the castle was a fair ways from the entrance to the game, and he felt like suggesting Vanellope leave a police escort for anyone (himself in particular) wanting to visit the game’s star characters at the tram station. Since there wasn’t such a provision, he’d hoofed it to the castle rather than waste some of his free time strolling, and was a little out of breath for it.

“Hh- Hey guys. Is Van- President Vanellopy in?”

He corrected himself, knowing that the royal guards loved formality and titles, and appreciated other’s playing along while they were performing their now superfluous-seeming job. He had to ask, because when she wasn’t hanging out with him, she loved to spend her time enjoying her new freedom to race again. Since she’d been busy most of the week, he hadn’t been able to ask to come visit, and so there was no guarantee that she wouldn’t be out on the track.

As he got nearer, he noticed the oreos looked haggard, their front cookies not lining up exactly with the back and their spears listing at least five degrees away from their normal perpendicular position to the ground. One marched arhythmically towards the door and casually waved him in.

“Yeah Ralph, she’s in the war room with the other racers.”

Ralph slowed down, not fully entering the walls of the pastel palace. Instead he stared in shock at how lax the guards had become, comparatively. The other door guard interpreted his shock as confusion, and pointed down a hallway.

“Sorry. He means the dining room.”

Ralph moved down the hall, passing the unused and ominous throne that was only now being abandoned by the morning sun. It didn’t even register, as his mind was on Vanellope, and what state her kingdom could be in if even her oreo guards, normally so tightly put together, were falling apart. He passed a few servant’s rooms, mostly ones that dealt with the baking of state dinners and, of course, desserts. Finally he got to the tucked away front entrance to the kitchen, and branching away right after it, the hallway to the dining room.

He came into the room, remembering it only from a tour. The table was as he remembered it. A long, scallop edged vanilla wafer with pocky legs formed the table itself. A heavy brown table cloth in the irregular shape of chocolate spread lay on top of it, pushed into a crumpled mess by childish drawings, handfuls of edible crayons, and the tense posture of the racing children who starred in the game. At the head of the table, looking through a stack of drawings, was the president herself. Vanellope was worrying the edge of her hood, and paying close attention to whatever was on the paper. She didn’t notice Ralph until he stepped into the muted light of the rock-candy chandelier.

“Ralph! I didn’t know you were coming today!”

“What’s all this? You said you had some political stuff to deal with, but is this a drawing club or...”

He had been approaching Vanellope when he gestured to a drawing Rancis had been working on, frozen when Ralph entered, and was still holding his crayon over the last mark he’d made.  
He flinched when Ralph pointed him out, and drew the drawing into the shadow of his hunched shoulders, but Ralph had seen enough. It was a crude drawing, but he could make out spiky legs and clear wings and twin tails.

“Cybugs? Did Cybugs get back in?”

First there was the fear in Vanellope’s eyes. Then he saw it surface in the eyes of all the racers, much less restrained. He realized he’d been the first to say the word, no matter how long they’d been going over the problem before he’d arrived. He watched the young racers now look at each other, tiny gasps barely audible, indicating this was a fear they hadn’t realized they all shared. What had at first looked like a comical parody of a cabinet meeting had revealed itself to be a group of scared children, addressing the best they could something way out of their depth. Ralph remembered the tense couple of nights after the crisis where whatever men could be spared from watching the base in Hero’s Duty had come over, combing every portion of Sugar Rush by the grid. A few eggs were discovered, either unhatched when the volcano lit up or duds, but no signs of a live bug had been picked up. Still, they’d napped and cloud watched a few times since Vanellope’s reinstatement, and patted her back when she curled up because of the nightmares she had, just from the fact that some eggs had been left.

Questions got closed off in his throat as the idea made his stomach creep up in his chest. Instead of speaking, he reached an arm out for Vanellope, who was now standing in her chair. She left towards him, clinging to his chest and hugged by the crook of his arm as he slumped into her seat. No one made mention of their show of weakness, instead they stayed still, watching the two who had pulled their game through its last peril and sharing their sentiment. Finally, Vanellope unburied her face from his shirt, and they laughed half-heartedly at each other.

“Tough week kid?”

“You think, muddy buddy?”

Ralph checked his clothes for traces of mud, always a bit paranoid about it, and Vanellope giggled.

“But, maybe you can help us figure out what to do.”

“I don’t know what help I can be, but I’ll do whatever I can.”

He held out his finger to the president who he’d set down on his knee, and she gave it one sharp, stoic shake. She then turned to the table, looking anxiously down at the pile of drawings.

“Nobody’s been saying it’s a cybug, because we’re not actually sure it is. We’ve just been calling it the monster...”

Vanellope pointed across the table at two racers. Ralph hadn’t bothered to learn anyone’s names after their unpleasant first impression, and Van knew it.

“Crumbelina... and Swizzle... were the first to see it. They’d just tied a race, when suddenly a new track branched off from the finish line. Their cars went all possesed on them and drove to the new track. Then it was just the two of them racing, none of us that weren’t following a player’s commands.  
“It was a track on top of a big layer cake, and they were racing and they got to this big ramp over a crack in the cake. Suddenly -”

Vanellope paused, arms wide from dramatizing the story. Ralph wanted to laugh, but the subject was still serious. He raised an eyebrow, indicating she should go on.

“Out of the crack, this glowy ball of light comes up and this huge flying, screaming thing follows it! And their carts kept crashing into it cause they went over more ramps and it happened again and their carts weren’t taking any damage? and when they got to the end, even though Swizzle got there first, Crumbelina won somehow.”

While Vanellope caught her breath, Ralph looked to the two racers who must have originally told the story to Van. They nodded at him, confirming that the telling was accurate.

“Pretty much everyone else has run the new track but me, cause I’m pretty “OP” so I haven’t been in any ties.”

She brushed off her skirt, not hiding her pride. Ralph snorted and tapped her shoulder back.

“And what about the monster, you OP-brain? Have you seen it?”

Vanellope’s grin disappeared, her expression serious again.

“No. Nobody’s seen it off the track, and nobody’s seen it standing still. That’s why I brought everybody here today.” She gestured at them. “This ‘drawing club’ is so we can figure out what everyone agrees it looks like and what parts they were just making up.”

She sent a glare Taffeta’s way, who responded by crossing her arms and backing into her chair. The blonde mumbled,

“I swear it had a face...”

“Be quiet Taffeduhh. You’re just trying to make it sound scarier because it freaked you out so bad you cried!”

Taffeta blushed and looked down at the table.

“I cry a lot, okay. I’m working on it.”

Ralph looked to the side, at the chandelier, the top of Van’s head, anywhere but the disturbing scene. It must have been really terrifying to make the bratty racer to back down like she had. He was suddenly very glad Vanellope hadn’t run into the monster yet. But he also didn’t want to show his reaction to the racer’s statement about the creature. He told his friends about what had happened, how a bug taken over by turbo had tried to hold him back, had carried him up into the air, had been unable to hold onto him... But no one else had been close enough, high enough above the rim of the volcano to get a good look at what exactly that bug had become.

Honestly, the sight had disturbed him too much. The long candy neck that couldn’t logically support the head, the sharp, translucent hands that moved like they had a few hours before but were clearly comprised of candy or chitin or some substance without bones in-between. But mostly it was the splicing of the character models. He’d had a few nightmares about Vanellopy clipping into solid terrain and getting stuck there, and they gave him the same feeling. He couldn’t tell if he saw it as a cybug wearing the dastardly king’s skin, or the king wearing an empty cybug as a suit of armor, but one and thus half of the chimera read as dead to him. Dead and still dancing around, reminding him that whatever of Turbo was left was still hanging on so hard to life before he’d killed him.

Ralph felt a small hand slap at his chin softly. He looked down at the Sugar President. It looked like Vanellope knew what he was thinking about, or at least that it was the same thing that had been weighing on his mind for the past few weeks.

“Sorry, your presidency. So, if it is a cybug, why not just find it and have it put down? Why go through a whole art project.”

She sighed, looking back at her subjects.

“Well, I haven’t said it yet, but I think we need to figure it out, and learn about it, ‘cause I think it might be programmed in.”

“What?! You’ve been here for years. I don’t think you’d miss something as major as that for a month even, and I’m sure racers have tied bef-”

She held up a finger to his mouth, effectively halting his protests.

“Programmed in since tuesday. Or maybe monday night. We were turned off for a bit, everyone was fine when we were turned back on, but that was around the same time that programmy guy was here working on the puppy, right?”

Ralph nodded.

“So! So I think he messed with our programming. Even if that monster is just a rogue cybug or whatever, that’s the only way to explain the new cake track. That track has always been there, I’d climb up to it sometimes to look around. But there were never ramps there, so nobody could drive over the cracks.”

She was being so upbeat, but even with her gesturing wildly and flicking her ponytail like she personally warranted the tobikomi seal of approval, he could tell she was settling well into her presidential power. She was being so serious, not even being distracted by all the jokes about ‘the crack’ she could have made. He heard the smallest pause after she said it each time, so he knew she wasn’t just missing the opportunities.

“and... if the monster is permanent, we still need to find it. Find out where the big dumb lives, so we can stay away. I know we have a respawn system, but I’ve never seen it happen off the track. I’m sure it works, but I don’t want to test it.”

She was standing on his knee, hand on the arm he was resting on the table as she leaned nonchalantly to the side. But he felt her small fingers squeeze at his arm at the same time she said she was sure. The fastest he’d ever seen her look around, just to give him a look before she smiled reassuringly at the other racers. So she wasn’t sure, and she wanted him to know.

“Okay guys, here’s what we’re going to do for right now. You guys sit tight for today. I’ll be as graceful as Ralph here on the track today, so I can hopefully tie and get a look at whatever it is we’re up against.”

Ralph opened his mouth to challenge her, to insist she be careful and avoid what had been traumatizing for the others. But upon seeing how her fellow racers, who had kicked her car to pieces, were leaning in to her every word and watching her with respect and hope, he shut back up. As far as handling a crisis, the responsibility seemed to make the kid even more level headed. He was as proud as he was worried.

“Tonight each of you should talk to as many of the citizens as you can, and see if any of them have seen or heard anything, and where they did. Then, tomorrow after closing, we’re going to meet up back here to go on a search to figure out where this thing lives. Ralph will be there to make sure we’re safe if we run into it. Right?”

Ralph was skeptical of his own ability to hold off something that could take multiple cart craches, but he still nodded. He needed to be strong for the scared racers, rather than nervous.

She leapt down to the ground, waving for the rest of the racers to file out before her. She saluted them in a mockery of military formality by forming a backwards L on her forehead with a finger and thumb. The other racers grimly returned the salute, their with the L in the proper reading direction, with no hints of reluctance or mockery. Once they had all left on their new mission, Vanelllope let out a long, suffering sigh and the stiffness melted from her tiny spine. Ralph stood up behind her, arms crossed.

“I know what you need, miss bossypants.”

Vanellope didn’t even respond with words, only looking up at him with wide drooping eyes and a slack jaw.

“A round or two of Toss-the-President.”

She ran over and hugged Ralph’s leg, finally laughing again. “Congrats, doodyhead. I had some great ideas, but I think that’s the best idea either of us has had all morning.”

They quickly rounded up a few marshmallow maids and a few pillows from the guest bedrooms and before long Vanellope was giggling like mad, like there wasn’t some horrible monster out in the wilds of her game. As much as he could go tearing through the forests for it, with the intent to wreck it, what he was doing felt a lot more helpful.

All too soon it was close to the arcade’s opening. Vanellope walked with him to the train, subdued but much happier than she had been after the meeting.

“So, were you going to come and help us talk to the citizens about the problem tonight? Talking to them should be pretty easy even after a day of work. Besides... I think some of the gum drop ladies are sweet on you.”

She covered her mouth, snorting at her own joke. He rolled his eyes, knowing he’d never live down the time he’d patted a gum drop on the back too hard and had unknowingly had the poor, quiet lady stuck to the side of his palm for the rest of the evening. 

“No, I was thinking, you know, about going to another bad anon meeting.”

She stopped, looking up at him in confusion.

“It’s nothing too major. It’s just... I keep thinking about all the bad things that I’ve done, and now that I know what it means to be good to even just one person, they seem a whole lot worse. But, it’s probably a problem for a lot of villains! So I was thinking someone there might have some advice for me.”

He withdrew his hand from the back of his hair, not even having noticed his nervous habit kicking in. But Vanellope wasn’t laughing at him, just smiling. She’d seen him quietly beating himself up over something, and if he got over it, then even a giant monster didn’t seem unconquerable. She hugged him one last time, said farewell, and trotted back towards the castle. Before she got too far and before the tram had taken off, she turned back around and pointed at him dramatically.

“But you’ll be here right after the arcade closes tomorrow, right?”

“You got it, miss president!”

Ralph returned to his game uplifted, because despite his mixed feelings about leaving Vanellope and the Sugar racers to deal with the problem themselves for the night, he’d finally had some time to hang out with his best friend. After almost a week of giving her space to deal with the crisis, it had been like surfacing for air. Ralph punched out brick after brick in a happy haze, and, in his daydreaming, thought himself prepared for his evening after work.


	4. Villains not so Anon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kind Candy's pride is elastic enough, and he's not brave enough, so it's not that hard for him to reach out for help. It's just not the easy for Ralph to believe he would.

When Ralph left Fix-it Felix Junior that night, he noticed in the back of his mind the chaos going on. It was different from panic. It was quiet confusion, hushed words and curious looks around with starkly wide eyes. Digdug tugged on ***’s sleeve, pulling the taller down to his level for a whispered inquiry. Gazes wandered, but they bounced back and forth in a court of interest between two games in particular. This general focus of the crowd didn’t register at first because often there were a few characters who were loners in their own games, who ventured out maybe only once a month, and had to be caught up on the recent near-unplugging of sugar rush. So large hand gestures paired with quiet words aimed at the racing game wasn’t anything too out of the ordinary to Ralph.

He looked to where Q*bert and his game-mates had huddled so often in hopes of a helping hand, a habit of his, and smiled to see the corner still empty and well swept by the surge protectors. His had the thought to sit down with orange ball sometime soon and schedule some lessons in the displaced character’s language. They were neighbors now, and he could tell from the way the little guy would often nod agreement or scowl and grumble that he already understood the native nicelanders. If he was feeling disconnected from the normal residents, there were other places to look for friends, and he would appreciate being able to listen to Q*bert in addition to talking to him.

The thought of listening brought his focus to his ears and the odd silence around him. He turned and looked around, noticing princess peach and daisy’s eyes following him until he looked directly at them. He looked to the bubble bobble twins, watching them perform the same quick avoidance of eye contact, and could barely hear their disjointed and mumbled conversation that sounded like nonsense: things about end of the month plans and a picnic cancellation. He even saw, through a break in the crowd, a frazzled iteration of the surge protector urgently speaking under his breath to an uncomfortable looking Hero’s Duty soldier, the soldier responding, and the protector pointing at a sign above his head. He looked up in confusion, wondering if he had wandered towards Carnevil or Mortal Kombat instead of the tame and simple Pacman. But it was the same game he’d always associated with the meetings, even if he’d only been to one so far. He stood straighter than his normal slouch, looking over the heads of the crowd, and noticed plenty of characters going between games like normal, and others looking at the small clusters of suspiciously whispering characters, as baffled as he was.

He rolled his shoulders and turned back towards the relatively deserted platform of the classic game. Whatever people were talking about so seriously wasn’t serious enough to warrant any sort of alarm or station wide announcement. If there was anything interesting going on in Pacman, the best place to find out about it was inside the game rather than ask around outside. He sat down on the tram, alone and suddenly self conscious of this fact. He was still a little unsure around his fellow villains, knowing that a few of them were from much more violent games than his own. He knew they often gathered to the meetings early for the sake of making small talk and catching up before their issues got brought out on the table. He was still focussing on his relationships with his new best friend Vanellope and Felix and even Calhoun whenever she’d stop by. Jumping into a group of people who killed other characters for a living, even if it was just their job, was going to be jarring, so he’d avoided it this time and would be arriving right at the start of the meeting. After the mystery surrounding the platform at game central station, he was questioning his decision to cut it so close. If it was just a simple matter, he might not get a chance to hear about it before the meeting started in earnest.

Thinking he might still have time to hurry and ask what was up, he hustled out of the tram and down the steps of the platform inside the game. In his rush, he didn’t catch Pinky and Inky’s absence, usually ones who liked to at least say hi to the visitors of their game, even if they didn’t feel like attending the bad anon meetings. The dark, black tiled hallway leading to the community space was also empty of the sounds that had greeted his troubled self upon his first visit. No guttural agreements from Zombie, no interjections from Cyborg, and no gruff, hearty laughter from Bowser. He assumed he was arriving right when everyone was taking their seats and called out ahead of himself,

“Hey guys! Save me a seat. I was just running a little late.”

He slowed, though, as he got closer to the open doorway. The other villains’ backs were to him, and they were forming a semicircle, but they weren’t sitting in the provided chairs. Ralph stopped a few feet out in the hallway, where he could hear someone, Zangief maybe, talking slowly and soothingly to the half of the room he couldn’t see. Near the door, clyde was inching back, floating quietly between Bowser and Bison until he was behind them. He turned to look at the door and froze, lips snapping up into a thin line. Ralph stepped closer to him, trying to get a look at the side of the room everyone else was stiffly facing, and whispered,

“So, is this a bad time? Is this a special meeting? I should have checked before I came, but...”

Clyde whispered back breathlessly, eyes darting every so often behind him towards the crowd of villains and the focus of the room.

“It’s not... the best time, no. Someone’s new here and they have an, umm, big issue. So, you should probably head home Ralph.”

Suddenly there was the loud sound of clicking against the tiles, something large thumped against a wall in the common room, and a few chairs squeaked against the floor as they were jolted by some commotion beyond Ralph’s view. The villains nearest him tensed, then turned to look at him. Still crouched from his hushed conversation with clyde, Ralph saw Zangief under Bowser’s chin, giving him an apologetic look before the grappler turned back to whatever had caused such a reaction in the large crowd of villains. Then Ralph heard a voice straight out of his nightmares, both those where he was killed and those where he killed.

“Ralph? The Wreck-it Ralph? He’s... outside?”

“Ahhh, yes, Mr. Cybug. You know him?”

Ralph was simply standing still, straightened out and staring at the wall partitions behind the other villains’ heads. This had to be a dream. The giant clawed hand that awkwardly reached around the corner, searched around for his form, and, much more delicately than he had expected, picked him up. His suspicions about the reality of the moment were confirmed when he was easily lifted over the half-ring of his fellow game characters, limp feet catching M. Bison’s hat and hair pressed flat against the light mesh ceiling panels. The giant face, ducked down and less manically murderous than he remembered, was just further proof of the impossibility of the situation. Even though the monsterish mishmash wasn’t squeezing his claws to puncture his flesh or rending off whole limbs in his jagged grin, Ralph could tell this wasn’t a good dream. In his better dreams he filled in the blanks of his implied backstory, with family and friends and hugs, and a few times he even dreamed of Hyrule. He’d visited a Zelda cartridge that had been plugged into one of the arcade’s consoles, taking as much time in the lush, green forests as he could, and that one chance he’d had still pleasantly haunted his sleep. 

He tried to will his dream into a more pleasant one by focussing on the memories of the fantasy game, ignoring the cybug-man-monster carefully putting him down and the precise fixing of his overall strap, shifted by the process of being carried, performed by the giant claws that looked like they should have been a lot less accurate than they were. No matter how he concentrated on the memory of soft grass and flat pine needles beneath his feet and warm sun shining through the trees in warm patches on his skin, the abomination in front of him didn’t fade away. Instead, it had the audacity to wave at him, like it wasn’t sure Ralph recognized it. Ralph decided to do the next best way of making the monster disappear from his view: he turned around. He back now fully blocking out his view, he stared past the shocked villains at nothing in particular and waited for the nightmare to dissolve into another scenario. Whether the dream sequence he hoped things would shift to soon was scary or not, he was (to say the least) tired of this subject of sleep-strained nights.

“That’s fine, you don’t have to listen if you don’t want to. I just don’t want you sneaking off and organizing another attempt on my life. The last one was just too successful for my tastes.”

Ralph blinked. Was it acknowledging that it had died? That wasn’t usually part of the dream... He made eye-contact with Clyde through the space between the two bruisers, mouthed ‘am I dreaming? or is this real?’ The nod Clyde gave him wasn’t clear which one, but from the entirely logical sentences the monster and Zangief were exchanging, it sounded like his fears were confirmed.

“I was just saying that I came here in hopes of a little help-”

“And, I’m sorry you are misinformed about BadAnon. Just because we are bad, does not mean we will help you take over another game.”  
A sound like a huge, metallic cicada thundered behind Ralph.

“I come here looking for help to do this villain thing right, and all you want to do is jump to conclusions like they were platforms.”

Clyde pushed back into the circle, hovering at Ralph’s heel, literally and metaphorically standing beside him. His voice was tight with the unsaid terror that filled the room, but was delivered with the same facial expression of bravado that everyone other villain was wearing stubbornly, as it was often in a villain’s code to be cocksure in the face of even inevitable, plotted death.

“I don’t understand? How can you even be a villain if you don’t have a game?”

“I do have a game.”  
“He does have a game.”

It wasn’t obvious which reply came first, the one tainted by shock and unwilling realization, or the one that was a broiling mix of smugness and disappointment.

Ralph finally turned around. He glared, remembering the terror reborn on the child racers’ faces, glaring because it was for the same reason as before because the bug was himself reborn. The once-king acknowledged his glare, rather than imperiously looking at and yet a few feet passed him, which would have fitted his royalty better, but not his reality. He acknowledged, but was not phased, the glare natural given the circumstances, but he was not sorry for said circumstances.  
The right thing to give back to a glare like that was remorse, but he simply didn’t have enough in him to do the right thing.

 

\------

King Candy, as he still thought of himself in the face of his lingering complex of secrecy regarding his real name, had not come to this meeting to be mean-mugged by his murderer. He had, after days of planning and strategizing, and having all of those strategies beaten out of him by the undersides of carts, remembered the poster in the halls of the pacman maze for the anonymous meetings.

He’d snuck towards the tram station when the racers were busy watching the last race of the day. He remembered how much attention he’d payed, watching who would get the tenth medal of the day, ensuring they would feel free to spend it on the placement race. He also kept an eye on the ones who gathered only one or two, because if they entered they’d be desperate to make good on their investment, place and win more the next day. A desperate racer was one to avoid, since they might be a bit more eager to bump him off the track and out of the competition, back in the days when he wasn’t tied into the respawn system. He winced at the memory before tensing his legs forward against the earth. He had revved his wings, building up their speed before he let go of the ground and shot forward into the tube of copper wire. He spent his downtime practicing, not for his escape but practicing flying tight corridors by maneuvering the canyons as often as he could. By Friday he had flying in such an environment down as second nature, the only nature active at some points in his hypnotic course.

Game Central Station had been relatively deserted in the brief three seconds when he’d burst through the surge protector’s barricade (noticing it was shocking but far less painful than some of the hits he’d taken in the past few days). Only a few second player characters were milling around. He caught a glimpse of a large group of enemies from the later levels of Battletoads filling out into the open area, and wondered if they’d also caught a glimpse of him. It at least let him know he’d timed it right. He didn’t want to get there too early and be noticed. He knew he might be a shocking sight, awe inspiring even, enough so that the meeting might get called off prematurely.

For the few minutes before the villains started filtering in, he had scrambled for a hiding spot, then remembered how seldom video game characters even bothered to look up. He shifted his stance low to the ground next to the tram, pressing his abdomen flat to the ground and his ceri tensed against the tiles. He looked up, hands ready and flared, and picked a spot on the ceiling of the tram station. He sprung up, using his whole body to launch, and quickly had all his pointy bits (sans teeth) buried deep in the plaster of the ceiling and his belly flat against it.

From his vantage he had watched Pinky and Inky rush to the platform.

“There’s no one here? I heard something crashing around in here.”

“There’s no tram.”

“Well not everyone arrives by tram... I know I heard something. We should look around and see who it was.”

King Candy felt his breathing fans cut off, holding his breath instinctively to make less noise, as he saw Inky roll his eyes at Pinky’s paranoid demands. But they both filed back into the maze of hallways without a pause.

He had then waited until quite a few villains had filed in, giving the last, the cyborg Kano, time to get into the center common room. When he was sure the machine-man was far enough ahead of him, he let go of his grip on the roof and kicked his wings on mid-fall. His legs brushed the ground while he was stabilizing, and he eased onto them as he took further stock of the much-smaller-than-he-remembered hallways. He scuttled as quietly as he could down the hall, head hunched low and limbs held awkwardly close to his body. Very quickly he was upon the doorway. Most of the bad guys were setting up their chairs, Zangief and Neff the only ones remaining at the refreshments table chatting. The altered beast let the paper cup of coffee slip out of his leather hand when he noticed the giant face and mess of jagged limbs filling up the corridor.

The King had ducked his head in, peering around the room, and braced his hands on either sides of the door. Some of the attendees has looked like their first instinct was to bolt. From there the meeting had descended into a fit of posturing, interruptions, misunderstandings, and pacing around the room on the cybrid’s part. Eventually, without any intentional coordination, they’d formed a standoff formation. He was fuming, listening to Zangief’s misinformed plications and trying to discern from them what exactly he could say to the man in the five words he might be able to get in before he was interrupted or misinterpreted. Already zoned out from the red cyclone’s words, he focussed instead on the intriguing whispered conversation going on in the back of the room. He jolted at the name, his spiky crown scraping the ceiling and his cerci snapping into antenna-posture (and disturbing some chairs in the process). 

Now the mere presence of his murderer in the room had the peanut gallery quiet. Just by the fact that they knew the weight of this encounter, he could guess whatever Ralph and Felix and the Hero’s Duty Sergeant had seen, they’d told others about. He hated someone else making his own introduction. It at least explained the rampant assumptions that he was going to ‘take over’ someone’s game. (Honestly, he’d only ousted one character for her spot, which didn’t seem to him like taking over a game at all. It was simply... a pleasant coincidence that his primary competition had also been a royal.)

In addition to his version of the events leading to the king’s death that he had spread around, Ralph apparently now knew the opposite side of his current situation. His rage was not as overpowering as when he first was absorbed by the cybug, and had fizzled significantly since he awoke from his assumedly permanent death. It didn’t stand a chance against his curiosity over what his former subjects were saying about him. And his need wasn’t just out of vanity, but a need for self preservation. He knew from personal experience how much of a hell one could make another character’s life even if you could not kill them, and he yearned to know what his former subjects had planned in revenge.

“So, Ralph, how did you find out?”

“I sat in on a presidential meeting. Vanellope had it figured out as soon as she heard about the new track.”

He snapped it back so quickly, as if Vanellope’s quick thinking were supposed to intimidate or insult him. Of course she was precocious: she’d been programmed to be a ruler. The presidential title was news though. The rejection of the royalty system meant they remembered him, that the reset had only unlocked their old memories and hadn’t wiped the time he’d spent as their king from their minds. But it was motivated out of fear, and that could be good or bad. Fear could keep them scared of him even when he slept, or it could motivate them for much longer than basic revenge if they wished to make his regenerating life a living hell.  
“Would you want to know how I know, mister Wreck-It?”

He flatly stared the nine foot tall villain down, no need to defend against the now weaker wrecker and no energy left to put him in his place.

Ralph seemed angry and tense enough that he didn’t need a response to his goads to keep them going.

“No, not really. Let me guess though. You knew it as soon as you came back online. You knew you had to be programmed back in because no one here would even bother bring you back online.”

“Ooo harsh.But who’s ever shed a tear for the racer in first? I’ll tell you when I knew I was definitely part of the game.

“It wasn’t when I woke up. The game had been made glitchy just by my inclusion. It could have been a fluke. It could have been that little farce of a ruler getting into the code and bringing me back just to have me suffer for a while. The light that made me move without programming to guide my will could have just been a remnant, a placeholder for an intended boss that was never programmed in, and maybe I had just fallen victim to it. The ramps could have always been there, at the top of the cake plateau, I’d only heard about their unfinished construction from candy citizens who lived nearby. 

“I was only really sure today. After days of getting my body bashed to a crunchy pulp day after day by cars careening into it, somebody finally clipped my wings completely off. I’m sure the gouges are still there from where I tried to stop my fall. Nothingness for a few seconds, and then I come back, mid flight, right in front of the stupid exploiting light, and I’m right back on the same path I was before. That kind of situational respawning is too complex of a code for a beginner, and for the kind of temporary changes we- I could make as just a character.”

King Candy had been slowly extending his neck, creeping his slowly building snarl closer and closer to the almost-imperceptibly shivering Ralph. He wasn’t going to let the woodsman block out his words in his anger, so he carefully confronted him with them. His telescoping view also allowed him to closely watch the wrecker’s face. He could tell by Ralph’s confusion at his mentions of the light, and the analysis of what code could and couldn’t be changed, that the man was paying attention, and understanding what didn’t throw him for a loop. Maybe not caring, but at least not zoning out. His intense anger bubbled back up, and with all of its focus on Ralph, he didn’t take notice of any of the other villain’s reactions to his tirade. Until Neff spoke up.

“So, wait, you’re the boss that the racers battle in your game now?”

Clyde glided out of Ralph’s shadow, now baffled enough to forget his fear of the overpowered, cybeastial monster.  
“You chose to be a boss? Like, of your own free will?”

King Candy looked up, only now realizing that the badanon villains were actually listening to him. No longer interrupting him.

“Ah. No. I was sort of dead. Couldn’t really make any choices. Somehow, I was added back into Sugar Rush, programed into the respawn system, and I’m now a glorified tiebreaker. Whoever coded me in could tell anything at least half-cybug in origin is just a sucker for light, and just coded a ball of light to forcibly drag me across two racers’ path. The harder they hit me, the better they do and the little brat that brings me closest to being road kill wins the tie.”

He’d been clearing things up for the finally attentive baddies, but in the corner of his eye he could see reactions flickering under the hood of Ralph’s low eyebrows. So the oaf hadn’t known everything, which meant the children were probably also still in the conjecture stages. His attention returned to the circle when Zangief spoke up.

“The programmer, he came and fix Duck Hunt. It was a bootleg. He must have had look at Sugar Rush because of all the trouble you caused.”

“I? I cau-”

“Yeah, that’s what the sugar rush racers were thinking. The tie-breaking thing only started the day after he was here.”

The ex-king’s snarl quieted to a huff of frustration once Ralph was done cutting him off. He shifted closer to the other villains, pushing Ralph out of his main view and the other characters who hadn’t murdered him back as his focus. He was oddly pleased when the collective flinch backwards was markedly less drastic than it would have been moments before.

“It doesn’t really matter why it happened. It’s not something that can be solved from our side of the code anyway. What I really came here to ask about is, how do I do this villain thing? Is there any way to make it less painful? Any way to just do it better, make it so I’m not passing out at the end of the business day? I’m not saying I’ll be content with this, but-”

Clyde jumped back into the conversation with a desperate note in his voice. King Candy thought it stood to reason, Clyde speaking up and being daring despite being the smallest villain in the room. It was Clyde’s game after all, and he was safe here.

“Not content? You’ve seen what happens when you game jump and mess around in other games. Machines get unplugged, characters die for good, even you if it hadn’t been for the unpredictable outside help. So it’s not really a question of being content or not if one of those means you’re thinking of leaving Sugar Rush now.”

This had Ralph gaping, butting back into the already heavily fragmented conversation.

“No leaving Sugar Rush? I’m against anything that nightmare could do, breathing, talking, existing, but that’s the golden exception.”

“Ralph, think about it. Sugar Rush messed up once, not enough to get unplugged but enough that someone outside noticed it. Now he’s been permanently added to Sugar Rush, and if a permanent piece goes missing, that’s a second strike...”

Kind Candy watched the imbalanced scales of Ralph’s feelings on the subject weigh in favor of fear and concern, tilted by the thought that precious Vanellope’s game might be unplugged even after his willingness to sacrifice himself for her and Sugar Rush. At least she could escape this time. Still, the knowledge that he had some sort of power over his killer, even at risk to himself, was pleasing. So much so that he couldn’t stop an eyebrow from creeping up his forehead, broadcasting his smug realization. But, he pulled his expression back into formation, and coughed to bring the attention of the semicircle back to himself.

“Sorry Clyde, but I was just saying that while I’m not content with my current situation, it is shockingly comforting to know I have a place I will respawn, after years of having to obsessively think about never crashing or dying or getting bumped off the track. So what I really need is someone to come tell me what I could... be doing better. Look at how I’m tugged along and what I’m forced to do and give me some tips on it from an outsider’s perspective.”

He had struggled on that last bit. Finally coming out with it, asking for help, was admitting he wasn’t excelling at something, wasn’t the best at what he did for once. He grimaced and was unable to meet anyone’s eyes until he’d finished damning himself.

He looked back up quickly, shocked when a gruff voice made itself known for the first time in the meeting. Bowser smoothed back his tuft of hair uncomfortably, stepping forward and out of the line of villains.

“I guess I could help you, if all you need is someone to watch what happens in your fight and tell you different things you could do. According to my console versions I’m pretty good at strategy. Plus,”

He waved a clawed hand at the rest of the badanon attendees, then at the spiky shell on his back.

“I’m probably the best equipped here to deal with claws, teeth, and falls from tall heights. Shell versus no shell. You don’t get to be king of the koopas without one shell of a plastron.”

King Candy couldn’t respond for a moment. Someone had volunteered? Without giving him guff about him asking for help the first week in? And even more shocking, without him scraping a few threatening scars into the floor tiles to convey his seriousness about the matter? It was more than he had expected, and a bit more than he could take in at the moment. He drew backwards, fixing his collar to stall for time to respond.

“Ah... That would be most appreciated, Bowser. How about tomorrow around noon, if no one is near one of your levels? Those two Sugar Rush maniacs with the top scores usually like to come in on their lunch breaks and they’re evenly matched enough that they should trigger a tie breaker race.”

++++++++++++++++++++++

Ralph watched the two taloned villains (it was still odd to think of Turbo as an official villain and not just the bad guy of the arcade) awkwardly try to figure out how to shake hands when the hands in question were of such drastically different sizes. He mentally marked down the time that he’d have to either duck out on his game or drop bricks distractedly while he watched the screens across from him on the Sugar Rush game. He planned mainly on being there. He’d need to assure Vanellope that no new villains were trying to butt into her game, and be there to be sure that situation wouldn’t actually happen. The request from the warped racer had seemed innocent enough, but his only experience with Turbo so far had been one of constant deception. So there was no reason to believe this plan of his was entirely innocent, or, if it was, that it was the imposter-king’s only plan planned.

Ralph’s own plans for the next day, and the Sugar Rush Racer’s by proxy, had just been entirely shaken apart.


End file.
